Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  But overall, Cook considered Tonga a “Humane and peacable Nation,” one with which he obviously identified. Hereditary rule gave the government a “solid basis,” he wrote. Cook also sought to anglicize the subtropical landscape, sowing turnip seeds from England and presenting his hosts with a veritable menagerie: a bull and cow, ram and ewes, a boar and sows, a buck and doe, goats, and rabbits. He concluded, rather grandly, by telling islanders: “They and their Children were to remember that they had them from the Men of Britane.” Later, climbing a hill, he mused: “I could not help flattering myself with the idea that some future Navigator may from the very same station behould these Medows stocked with Cattle the English have planted at these islands.”

  We awakened our first morning in Tonga to find that time did indeed begin at the International Dateline Hotel. The dawn sun poured through our unshaded east-facing window, making us among the first people awake on the planet.

  “You’re on the wrong track with this Cook family thing,” Roger said from his bed.

  “Huh?”

  “That gum-chewing sheila at the bar last night. Macy Cook. She’s leading you down a blind alley. Cook wasn’t a root rat.”

  “Nine years in the Pacific? With all his men going at it like mad, and chiefs throwing naked women at him? Not one moment of weakness?”

  “Not Cook. He kept Percy in his pants.”

  I pondered this for a moment. “What about Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings? Historians insisted he never touched her. Then they did a DNA test.”

  “That’s your filthy American. Cook was a Yorkshireman. Self-disciplined. I won’t have it.”

  We agreed to leave the topic alone until meeting with Macy later in the week. In the meantime, I had another bloodline to follow. The current monarch, His Majesty King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV, was descended from the Tu’i Tonga Cook had met. It seemed appropriate that I seek a royal audience, too. The king certainly sounded like a colorful character. His passions included numerology, American televangelists, and controversial business schemes such as selling Tongan citizenship and passports to wealthy Asians, including Imelda Marcos and other fugitives. Though exceptionally large, the king was also a keen athlete; he still visited the gym, in his eighties, and promoted sports. “It is good for girls,” he once declared of field hockey. “It will keep them busy with their training, and going to bed early instead of going out to night clubs and pursuing a lustful lifestyle.”

  The etiquette surrounding the king also intrigued me. I’d read that his subjects still approached him as they had the Tu’i Tonga in Cook’s day, by scuttling forward on their hands and knees and kissing the monarch’s fingers or feet. When departing, they crab-walked backward, to avoid showing the king their rear.

  “You groveling Americans will crawl at the hint of any royalty, no matter how ridiculous,” Roger said, when I confessed my desire for an audience. “I’ve got a queen already, and that’s one monarch too many.” He opted to lounge by the hotel pool while I headed off in pursuit of an interview.

  The king’s principal palace—one of seven royal residences—stood by the water a half mile from the Dateline. As palaces go, it was unpretentious: a rambling Victorian weatherboard, prefabricated in New Zealand, with gables, a turret, a rust-red roof, and a wraparound porch. It looked like a gingerbread guest house on Cape Cod. A broad lawn swept down to the sea, and ducks squawked in a yard behind the palace. The security consisted of a guard in an olive uniform and black beret, snoozing in a sentry box.

  Before leaving Sydney, I’d tried without success to contact the king’s private secretary, ’Eleni ’Aho, by phone, fax, e-mail, and courier-delivered letter. Now that I was here, I decided to press my case in person. I found the secretary in a small wooden building across from the palace. A handsome, middle-aged woman, seated beneath a portrait of the king, ’Eleni ’Aho seemed less than delighted to see me.

  “Did you receive my request for an interview with the king?” I asked.

  Her eyes darted away, then settled on her cluttered desk. “I might have,” she said. “How long are you staying?”

  “Until Monday morning.”

  “I am so sorry. We might have fit you in later next week.”

  “Next week is okay. I can stay.”

  She sighed, flipping through a desk calendar. “I will have to speak to His Majesty, of course.” I gave her another copy of the obsequious letter I’d sent, including a list of sample questions about Cook and Tongan history. Then I tried to make small talk. The secretary regarded me coldly. So I asked whom else I might speak to while waiting to hear from the king.

  “Have you been to the tourist office?” she asked.

  I’d stopped there on my way to the palace and collected faded, dispiriting pamphlets, including one filled with useful phrases for tourists: “May I have a mosquito net?” “Is it ripe?” “Is it safe to swim here?” I asked ’Eleni if she might recommend anything else. We engaged in a brief staring contest. Finally, she gave me the name of the Tongan government’s official spokeswoman. “Good luck,” she said, with a tone that suggested I’d need it.

  Wandering the streets around the palace, I saw a more picturesque side to Nuku’alofa than I had the previous day. Across from the palace stood the members-only Nuku’alofa Club, a weatherboard antique shaded by an enormous bougainvillea. Peering through the window, I saw dartboards, billiards tables, and pictures of British and Tongan royalty. The nearby headquarters of the Free Wesleyan Church had jigsaw curlicues and a widow’s walk. Even more reminiscent of New England was the parliament building, a white clapboard box with high windows and a peaked red roof. It looked like a whalers’ church in New Bedford or Nantucket.

  I found the government spokeswoman, ‘Eseta Fusitu‘a, in a modern office block beside the parliament. Like the king’s secretary, she seemed very put upon by my presence. As head of the Government Information Unit, and the person recommended to me by the king’s secretary, she couldn’t ignore my request for information. However, she made it clear she didn’t suffer fools, cutting me off as soon as I asked about Cook by reciting her graduate degrees in Pacific history.

  “I think Cook liked and respected Tonga because he saw in it a mirror of England,” she said. “Order, hierarchy, tidiness—it was like the world he came from, and much better than the primitive societies he’d visited elsewhere.” Tongans, in turn, admired Cook and his men, and gradually adopted British customs: titled nobility, a coat of arms, a parliament with lords and commoners, and a monarch who took the name of the reigning British king, George. “You could say Britain is just a Western form of the Tongan system,” ‘Eseta said.

  If anything, she felt Tonga’s system was far superior to Britain’s because it had stayed true to its origins. The king and thirty-three noblemen (including ‘Eseta’s husband) still controlled almost all the land and power. The church remained potent. And islanders clung to their fierce sense of autonomy and distinctiveness, rather like British Tories who resisted the European Union. “The world does one thing and we go on our merry way,” she said.

  From what I’d read about Tonga, this was certainly true. The tiny island nation had earned some $30 million U.S. by selling citizenship and passports, despite international condemnation. Tonga also ignored censure by Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department for its imprisonment and intimidation of journalists and political dissidents. Nor did Tonga have much regard for the conventions of the United Nations, which it had recently joined. “The U.N. is a joke,” ‘Eseta said, waving her hand in the air. “It must restructure itself and its attitudes and stop telling countries how to run their affairs.”

  She had even less time for Tonga’s neighbors. “We’re more independent and have greater confidence than other Pacific nations. That’s very much part of our psyche.” She shrugged. “They think we’re arrogant. So what? We tend to know our minds and are unconcerned about what others think of us.”

  This indifference extended to me. ‘Eseta
studied the clock throughout our brief chat, yawned histrionically each time I opened my mouth, then asked, “Where are you parked?” I tried one last question: Where could I find a copy of Tonga’s constitution? “At a public library,” she said.

  I’d asked about a library at the tourist office and been told that Tonga didn’t have one. When I mentioned this to ‘Eseta, she yelled to a secretary to make me a copy of the constitution. Then she held out a limp hand and vanished down the hall.

  Interviews with disobliging officials are a staple of foreign reporting. I’d spent the better part of a decade being lied to or thwarted by Middle Eastern gatekeepers. Tonga was starting to remind me of Saudi Arabia, another haughty kingdom that regards the rest of the world as rabble. Saudis, however, can afford to be arrogant: they’re guardians of Islam’s holiest places—and of a quarter of the world’s oil reserves. Also, even the most unhelpful Saudi official will ply you with pleasant chat and endless cups of tea. In tiny Tonga, I was barely managing eye contact.

  Roger had attracted much more solicitude simply by lounging beside the hotel pool. As soon as I joined him, an enormous man appeared. “Your friend insists he is not yet ready for his massage,” the man said, rubbing meaty hands. “How about you?” I shook my head. The man smiled at Roger. “Any time, my friend, I wait for you. My bed and oil are just over there.”

  This freelance masseur had been pestering Roger all morning. “I can’t pull crumpet to save my life,” he said, nodding at two bikini-clad tourists on the recliners beside him. “But this Sumo wants to wrestle me onto his mattress and slather me with coconut oil.”

  When not fending off rubdowns, Roger had been reading about Tonga. He’d learned that a tortoise Cook gave the Tongans in 1777 had survived until 1966. It had roamed the palace grounds, been given a noble name, Tu’i Malila (“King of the Residence”), and even accorded a place in royal kava circles. The tortoise’s remains now resided at a museum called the Tongan National Center. “Let’s go pay our respects,” Roger suggested.

  Like the rest of Nuku’alofa, the Tongan National Center was expiring from neglect. The museum had dead lightbulbs, and dead flies littering the floor. An unconscious caretaker rested his head on the front desk. We found Tu’i Malila’s stuffed remains in a large, dusty case. The tortoise’s shell looked discolored and dented, slightly charred. A sign explained why. During its long life, Tu’i Malila went blind and “endured being kicked by a horse, struck by wheels of a carriage, and being caught in a grass fire in the royal gardens.” Oddly, its sex remained in doubt: “Although scientists believe it’s a female, Tongans believe it was male.”

  There wasn’t much else to see in the museum, apart from the outfit worn by the current monarch’s mother, Queen Salote, at the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II in London. Salote had charmed the British public by riding through heavy rain in an uncovered carriage, as a gesture of respect for Elizabeth. The London press dubbed her “the largest queen of the smallest kingdom.” Salote’s enormous red gown looked as though it would be baggy on Roger, and her leather sandals were twice the size of mine. Sino molu, “soft body,” was a quality much admired by Tongans. As in Cook’s day, Tongans expected their rulers to be especially large.

  We stayed to watch an evening dance show in a building adjoining the museum. The women, clad in knee-length grass skirts and strapless tops made of tapa, swayed with the easy grace that Cook noted in describing island dance, but with none of the “indecent actions” he alluded to. However, a master of ceremonies urged us to come up and stick paper money to the dancers’ well-oiled skin. “Somehow I don’t imagine Cook doing this,” Roger said, pasting a banknote on a woman’s gyrating shoulder.

  The kava ceremony that followed was also modified for modern consumption. Women mashed the root and strained the juice rather than masticating it. Served in coconut shells, the kava had the grayish-brown tint of old dishwater, and a flavor that was faintly bitter and peppery. I emptied three shells, hoping to experience the opiumlike “stupefaction” described by Cook’s surgeon, but felt no more effect than a slight numbing of my tongue.

  Back at the hotel, we drank rum instead and watched TV, which had come to the kingdom only a few years ago. The two state-owned stations offered sycophantic reports on the king, a Billy Graham special, and strange documentaries. One, about Chinese calligraphy, was broadcast in Chinese, with Chinese subtitles. Another told of a Berber bride fair in North Africa where women accepted proposals of marriage by saying, “You have captured my liver.”

  Roger chortled over his rum. “They’d never capture mine. They’d never find it.”

  I fell asleep to a program even more peculiar in these surroundings—a curling match between Canada and Sweden—and woke to yet another blinding dawn. The bathroom door fell off and splintered as I stumbled into the shower. Roger opted for a swim instead and found his friend, the masseur, waiting for him. In the ill-lit restaurant, an elderly couple stared glumly into space, waiting for signs of breakfast, which failed to appear. Expatriates, we later learned, referred to the Dateline as the Dead Line.

  “Let’s get out of town,” Roger said.

  “Fine. Where to?”

  “Anywhere but here.”

  We hailed a taxi and asked the driver, a man named Sione, if he’d show us around the island, which was only about twenty miles across and a few miles wide (all of Tonga’s scattered landmass covers just several hundred square miles). Luckily, Sione spoke English and was by far the friendliest Tongan we’d met. Less fortunate was his flatulence. Big, even by Tongan standards, he lifted one buttock every few minutes and unleashed a thundering fart. Roger, seated up front, struggled with the broken passenger-side window, which refused to go down. He lit a cigarette instead, and Sione joined him. The airless taxi quickly filled with a foul-smelling fug.

  As we passed the palace, I mentioned my visit there the previous day. “We love our king!” Sione exclaimed.

  “Why?”

  “Because he is fat. Too fat!” Sione meant this as a compliment. “A little man cannot have big power. And a big man needs a big woman. So everyone is fat!” He laughed, raising one buttock again.

  We asked Sione to drive us to the far end of Nuku’alofa’s waterfront, close to where Cook had anchored on his third voyage. The paved coastal road ended at a rubbish dump, and just beyond it sprawled a shantytown of houses that were little more than animal pens, with outdoor privies and pigs taking cover from the sun in rusted cars. Some of the shacks teetered on concrete stilts above pools of fetid water. Sione said the people who lived here were poor migrants from other islands who flocked to the capital in search of work, swelling Nuku’alofa’s population to thirty thousand. Many ended up in flood-prone lowlands like this.

  He seemed embarrassed by the squalor and steered us around the coast to a lagoonside neighborhood of grand, villa-style houses. Many had high-security gates, tennis courts, and Mercedeses and BMWs parked in the drive. “The nobles,” Sione said. A few minutes later we passed a vast estate that appeared to be modeled on a Southern plantation, perched on a hill well back from the road. This was the home of the crown prince, a globe-trotting businessman who drove around Tonga in a black London cab. His sister, the princess, lived across the road; two enormous stone tigers guarded the entrance to her drive.

  A short way on, we sprang into open countryside. Fields of tomato, banana, and yam spread on either side of the road, fertile and orderly, much as Cook had described them. Sione pulled over beside a plaque that said: “Here stood formerly the Great Banyan or Captain Cook’s Tree under the branch of which the celebrated navigator came ashore.”

  The spot was peaceful, skirted by mangroves and facing a lagoon. At the time of Cook’s visit here in 1777, he found “a Villige most delightfully situated on the bank of the inlet where all the great men in the island resided.” Cook also admired the well-fenced estates, which included ornamental plants.

  The “great men” had since decamped to Nuku’alofa, leaving
no sign of humanity apart from a graveyard. Tongans, like Niueans, lavished great care on the dead, though their style was much gaudier. The graves were decorated with plastic flowers, porcelain cupids, teddy bears, and Madonna figurines. Brilliant quilts, hoisted on posts, rose behind many of the graves. It seemed as though all the effusion lacking in the Tongan personality found expression in funereal exuberance. When I queried Sione about this, he shrugged and said, “Life is short. Death very long. Too long!”

  We continued along the coast to a village called Talafo’ou. According to my guidebook, the village was famed for its “smart pigs.” Sione pointed across a tidal flat at a dozen or so porkers snuffling in the sand and mud. “Look, pigs go fishing!” We walked out for a closer view and saw that the pigs were rooting for crabs, even wading into the snout-deep water. Sione said the pigs were not only smart but also exceptionally tasty. “Tongans love to eat pig,” he said. “Also ducks, chickens, dogs. Cats, cars, houses. Everything!”

  Our next stop was Tongatapu’s premier tourist attraction: Ha’amonga’a Maui, a massive stone arch that resembled one of the trilithons at Stonehenge. The three stones weighed some forty tons each, with the lintel fitted into notches atop seventeen-foot-high uprights. Simply moving the stones would be a major engineering feat today, and much more so in the thirteenth century, when Tongans had erected them. No one knew for sure how this had been done, or what purpose the structure served. The current king, who took an interest in such things, hypothesized that the trilithon acted as a seasonal clock, and tests conducted during the solstices lent support to this theory.